In the early nineties Christian Gabel found a collection of images which appeared to have been working-draft sketches for a movie. The pictures where marked as being from 1982 and showed scenes from a post-apocalyptic Karlstad (a medium-sized Swedish town).1

Now Christian has created a sort of soundtrack to this non-existing movie. It’s a beautiful synth soundtrack that’s inspired by the music from Blade Runner, The Escape from New York and similar movies.

I don’t know if the story of him finding pictures at a flea market is true or not, but it really doesn’t matter. The music, called Krater, is very beautiful and if you’re a fan of either vintage synth music, early eighties sci-fi movies or both you’ll likely love this.

It appears the new MacBook Air’s got a problem with transmitting via long VGA cables. A few days ago Christian Heilmann wrote:

I set up on stage, opened the shiny new expensive laptop, connected my VGA cable and saw some blue bars – that’s it. The new Macbook Air does not connect to projectors via VGA with long cables. We verified that with mine, Matt May’s and some other speaker’s Macbook Air in two rooms, with different cables, different connectors, projectors and all the settings we can think of. It seems the great shiny new Thunderbolt connection is good for file transfer but underpowered for projection.1

Lea Verou reported the same problem on twitter, but then found and reported the following a solution:

@LeaVerou: Apparently, the MacBook Air VGA problem is solved if you boot it with the adaptor connected! CC @codepo8 @robhawkes2

A lot of technical problems at my workplace is related to projectors and presentations. To accommodate old pc laptops a few of our lecture halls still has VGA as their main, or only, means of communication between computer and projector. Given the success of the MacBook Air it’s likely that this problem will arise a lot in the coming year or two. Therefore I’m writing it down here, for me to remember and for others to find.

Rebooting the computer with whatever cable links you to the projector already hooked up is usually a good thing to try whenever you get a problem like this, regardless of whether you’re using VGA or not and a new MacBook Air or not.3

Were I a Twitter client developer, I would get in touch with other client developers and start talking about a way to do what Twitter does but that doesn’t require Twitter itself (or any specific company or service).

[…]

Under the hood, following somebody is really just subscribing to a feed of their statuses. Posting is really just updating a feed of your own statuses.1

Brent Simmons writes about Twitter’s changes to its API rules and threats to third party developer. He brings up an interesting idea, that developers could create their own decentralized Twitter-like experience.2

Sure it would likely be just for geeks, but I think third party clients are almost exclusively used by more or less geeky people and Twitter itself was once used solely by geeks.

In the early days, the third-party ecosystem was a playground, in which developers could, and did, come up with uses for the service that were never intended or dreamed of by Twitter itself. You like the word ‘tweet’? The bird icon? The character counter? The replies and conversations features? A nice native client on the iPhone? All done first by third-party developer Iconfactory with its Twitterrific app.1

To me, this is still the very thing that makes Twitter appealing. I’m a happy Twitterrific user, not a happy Twitter user. If third party clients would disappear, it’s very possible that I might stop using Twitter.